valley

SAN FRANCISCO--Talk to just about any entrepreneur in Silicon Valley these days, and there's a better than average chance one name will come up: Ron Conway.

The founder of SV Angel, an investment firm that has its fingers in dozens of the biggest names in technology today, Conway is known by many to be among the savviest investors around. His portfolio is a who's who of the best and brightest in tech--Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox, Groupon, and dozens of others. He's not only successful, he's also prolific.

In a recent profile in Fortune, Conway explained that he … Read more

Silicon Valley is experiencing a surge in job growth and wealth, outpacing the national economic recovery, according to a new report released today.

Silicon Valley added 42,000 jobs last year, an increase of 3.8 percent, much higher than the nation's 1.1 percent growth rate, according to the 2012 Silicon Valley Index (PDF), a report issued by nonprofits Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

The unemployment rate for the region declined 1.4 percent to end the year at 8.3 percent, on par with the national average but well below California'… Read more

Facebook just filed to go public after a long, tense wait today, and so it seems like a good time to remind everyone who's not in tech and finance to just forget it's even happening. Facebook's IPO will make some bankers, some venture capitalists, some privileged early investors, and some early employees rich. Everyone else should steer clear.

For one thing, you'll have to steer clear, at least at first. What happened today is simply a filing for a public offering--meaning that you Normals will have to wait months before you can buy Facebook stock, if … Read more

There's no doubt that there will someday be another round of superstar entrepreneurs on the order of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Steve Jobs. But can a group of judges in an arbitrarily cobbled together "American Idol" for startups be the ones to identify them?

With its Startup World competition, which it announced today, The Next Web clearly thinks that the answer is yes.

"It's inevitable there will be the next Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, or Facebook," The Next Web wrote this morning in its announcement of Startup World. "… Read more

"Eraserhead" baby, meet your match.

It seems engineers and tinkerers never tire of creating horrific human simulacra in robot baby form, or even robot fetus form. But the sheer nightmarish genius of this latest unholy spawn gives one pause. Behold it in the video below.

The silently mewling babe is a collection of whirring servomotors and flailing claw-arms, seemingly powered by unseen mechanisms beneath its blanket.

Its movements are perfectly lifelike, and yet its appearance is so alien-death machine-like that I get an overwhelming urge to cast it far into the Uncanny Valley from whence it came. … Read more

day on the job MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you don't regularly hang out with coders at work, you may think it takes a long time to write a new feature. That's a quaint notion to Devon Rifkin.

Rifkin is a front-end engineer at RockMelt, the maker of a hot new browser that integrates many of the functions of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media directly into the browsing experience. I've come to RockMelt on a recent Tuesday to shadow Rifkin as part of my Day on the Job series, and now he's schooling me on just … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Bill Clerico may not be Steve Jobs, but he's doing something very Jobsian: "I'm pushing people to do things they don't think are possible."

Clerico is CEO of WePay, an online payments collection service that is taking on the likes of PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and others, and which is growing--fast. Its 2012 revenues will likely be several times that of 2011, and that means a big expansion in users and employees. Plus long hours and hard work for those already on staff.

It's nearly 10 a.m. on a recent Monday, … Read more

For startups in Silicon Valley, little is more prized than an audience with Reid Hoffman.

Entrepreneurs come for his money, attention, but most of all, his advice.

Hoffman is a bit of a mystic "startup whisperer," according to a New York Times profile on 44-year-old co-founder of professional network LinkedIn.

The profile paints a portrait of a man who juggles a full schedule of meetings with people seeking his guidance, giving rapid-fire suggestions on platforms, presentation, and strategy, while trying not to be tied to Facebook, Twitter, or any of the four cell phones he carries.

LinkedIn, which … Read more

commentary The introduction late last week by members of the House Judiciary Committee of the "Stop Online Piracy Act," or SOPA, may test a long-standing reluctance by technology companies to take up arms in the legislative battleground.

The bill, introduced as the House version of the Senate's Protect IP Act, solves few of the glaring problems of the Senate bill and introduces many all its own. While Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) may have given in to hyperbole in calling SOPA "the end of the Internet as we know it," there is certainly a great deal … Read more